I’ve never understood how this helps anyone but the police. Maybe it’s a crime deterrent knowing the cops have your prints. But for missing/abducted kids? How does it help there? Would DNA samples help too?

I have always thought that the fingerprinting kids for ‘teh children’ was a bit hinky. They use military fingerprint databases and arrest(not conviction) prints for criminal investigations, what cop would allow this collected treasure trove be discarded when the kiddies arrive at age of majority and civil rights.

I know after getting arrested/printed for protest in a group on several occasions I have always felt that chilling sensation, more inclined to consider what allegedly protected activities I participate in. Maybe it is also being old and having kids to worry about, but I think the feeling is stronger with my prints in a file containing who knows what other information.

It never even dawned on me until now. This idea is always sold to us as helping to save kidnapped children, but it could not possibly do that, except maybe by identifying a fairly fresh corpse found hundreds of miles away. I can’t remember a case like that, ever. We are always presented with the kids as victims, but whoever initially developed this idea wasn’t thinking that at all.

Not to rain on the parade, but the cops don’t keep the fingerprints–they’re distributing kits,for the kids/parents to keep at home (edit) and using their mobile video, digital scanning equipment and printing to make the cds with the info and create an ID card (/edit). The fingerprinting is just a smallish part of it–pictures, descriptions, audio and a video are part of the usual kit, which could be useful for a few reasons to have for your kid, even beyond crazy-kidnap-paranoia. I agree the finger prints are the least likely to be good for anything but body id or silly rare cases of identifying a runaway that turns up 10 years later–but… again… the parent’s both make it and keep it --not the police). At least that’s how it works with that particular kit everywhere else I’ve heard of it.

When I first saw this, I could have sworn that they said that they were giving the finger-print cards to the parents to save for the implausible contingency in which they were needed, not keeping the cards themselves. This would be equally useless, but less sinister. Is it clear that they’re keeping the cards now? If so, ugh.

That’s the only important point: if the parents are the sole custodians of the fingerprints, then this is a good idea (at least, if the parents have the decency to give the kids, upon reaching legal adulthood, the option of having the records destroyed). Giving this info to any government, or non-government, organization is a terrible idea.

Most people don’t have the ability to scan a fingerprint, or make an id card. So, yeah, they setup mobile stations to do that, and print the card/generate the cd to give to the parents. They say explicitly all over the place that their not keeping the data, for what its worth.

But, sure, they “could” be lying about keeping the data and this is all a huge, secretive scheme to get fingerprints for our children. After the revelations on phone monitoring, who knows? Sounds a bit far-fetched though in this case, as the data isn’t that useful considering the size and potential outrage such a back-door program would cause were it to be revealed.